Just two years ago, this would have been an extraordinarily radical essay. Its premise is that court-packing—increasing the number of seats on the Supreme Court to change its ideological makeup—is, in ...

The United States stands out among Western democracies for its extreme partisan political polarization. It has reached the level of “pernicious polarization,” by which I mean a division of society ...

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The authoritarian threat won’t recede until the world’s democracies—the United States most of all—show the world that they uphold democratic norms and deliver for their people.

To what extent does or should populism exclude certain types of issues and political commitments/alliances, and should the Democratic Party respond to the electoral ...

The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding by Osita Nwanevu • Random House • 2025 • 384 pages • $31 In 2013, The New Yorker published an essay observing that one of ...

When we think about economic growth, we generally think about inventions and technology—from the combustion engine to the iPhone—and about the effects of capital accumulation, like big dams or ...

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America By Beth Macy • Little, Brown and Company • 2018 • 384 pages • $28 All tragedies have heroes. Obvious heroes, complicated heroes, ...

For the longest time, I kept a cartoon from Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” series hanging above my desk. It features his character Bongo the one-eared rabbit, looking up at a larger, angry, looming ...

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet by Edward Luce • Simon & Schuster • 2025 • 560 pages • $35 Zbigniew Brzezinski’s determinedly hawkish views about the Cold War made ...

In his second term, President Trump has rejected the long-held tradition of regulatory independence by firing or attempting to fire officials at agencies charged with setting monetary policy, ensuring ...

It was about five years ago that I began thinking about a special issue of Democracy on the Constitution. I was frustrated with the Electoral College and the Senate even then, which led me to do some ...